Edward Hopper and Fairfield Porter, a legacy

The powerful modernist narrative that marked the 20th century had nothing to do with Edward Hopper. He went his own way. His legacy is that artists can own whatever they can claim.

In the 1950s, Fairfield Porter wasn’t interested in Hopper’s romance with urban architecture, but when Clement Greenberg told Porter he could no longer paint the figure, because figurative painting was dead, Porter did it anyway, which is a move out of Hopper’s playbook.

Porter created a small version of what he could recognize as reality, some colored fragment of daily life he could secure in oils on canvas and stare at forever. Poet James Schuyler once described his methods:

Two gray strokes together casual as a scribbled note make a roof tower.

His modesty makes him look minor next to Hopper, but that modesty is a choice, not a limitation.

Contrary to Greenberg, figurative painting did not become an endangered species heading for a forced extinction, but the triumph of Hopper and Porter does not mean that generations of realist painters who followed them can hitch wagons to their stars.

Although realists toil in studios around the world, most seem to operate on a dare-to-be-dull imperative. Their skills hobble them, because they value their ability to illustrate a scene more than their ability to think through and deliver on the complexity of that scene’s visual meanings. Art has always been about thinking, and empty-headed portraits of people, places and things rarely cut it in the past and don’t cut it now.